is it possible to build a completely Identicle comp and join them together

I have been thinking of this for a while and then forgot about it until some one posted the same question on a different forum.
is it possible to build an identical computer to one you already have then join them into a cluster ( kind of like they do for the folding network cluster) and turn then into one super computer. and if so what would the benefits be of doing this?
because like I said I would like to try this but being that I am not a well off person my curiosity has me really thinking about this

Also depends on the program.. for example linux has a great program so that if your compiling a program and you have 3 other linux machines you can link them together to share the process power to compile something faster.

Its mostly about research tho and I'm not sure if FAH would work with this or if it would benefit you in anyway.

They don't have to be identical, but yes you can, in-fact thats how alot of super computers are built nowadays. In linux, I forget the name of the application offhand, you can create work to be done in this way. Typically these are called "beowolf clusters".

Besides a corporate environment the only applications a consumer uses that might benefit would be video rendering. (take lots of home videos? and if so, do a lot of editing with effects?) But then the software that can multithread across the network are not $100 at the local store. Sony's Vegas comes to mind, Adobe premiere (some expensive version) can probably do it too.

But for everyday use/gaming in a windows environment (just assuming here, its likely what you're using) there's no real benefit.

I rendered a 4gb 1080p MP4 file on my laptop (core 2 duo 2.33Ghz 533fsb 4gb ram) and it took about 24hrs, all I did was rotate the video 180deg, resize, phase out some high freq background sounds and encode in divX... had 5 of those video's to do, would have been nice to have my rendering system up and running.